


Group Velocity

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [16]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Sheltering In Place, constancy amid upheaval, novel coronavirus pandemic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23205907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: Remember Super Tuesday? March 3 feels like a million days ago.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273
Comments: 30
Kudos: 84





	Group Velocity

He throws down his bags less quietly than he means to, but he is disgusting, soiled, every bit of him invisibly purple with virus, and he needs to wash now, wash forever. He would have burned his shit outside before entering, cleansed himself in flame, but, neighbors. 

“Fuck me,” Grantaire hollers from the back room. “Enj?”

“I made it.”

“You’re here.” Disbelief lights Grantaire’s face as he rounds the corner into the living room, already reaching for his long-distant voyager returned.

“No, don’t,” Enjolras says, elbows-first. “Don’t touch me. I’ve been in two airports and a bus and a tram, and just hordes of us, stagnant hordes waiting together, breathing our micro-droplets all over each other. And everyone has it in DC, Grantaire, _everyone_ , and I can’t.” He’s thrown his jacket onto the pile of baggage and shoved up his sleeves, heading for the sink.

“You didn’t say.”

“I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to. Everything’s so minute-by-minute,” he says, lathering up the kitchen soap between his knuckles. “I left the hotel before _breakfast_.”

“Shit,” Grantaire says. He’s right behind Enjolras now, and Enjolras knows he’s seconds from wrapping an arm around him and turning him for a kiss, which just, he can’t. 

He lifts a foot to keep him back. “No,” he says again. “No, I need to—” He’s already dodged out of the kitchen, wiping his dripping hands on his shirt as he undoes the buttons. “There’s no way I haven’t been exposed.”

The travel-creased blue shirt and trousers puddle ignominiously on the bathroom floor, stewing in their contagion. “Don’t touch any of my stuff!” he yells out at Grantaire, who is watching from the hall, as he climbs into the shower.

“I work in a museum,” he says, leaning on the doorframe like the world hasn’t inverted, like it’s still safe to touch things. 

“They closed, right?”

“Yeah, to visitors. A couple days ago. But until then, people everywhere. Children with sticky hands, adults coughing on shit. It’s not like I live in a cave.”

“But you’re off now.”

“I still have to go in for some receiving the next couple days; you don’t just turn an antiquities shipment around mid-journey.”

Lamarque gave all the out-of-towners the boot. “It’s like this now,” she said, pointing to yet another story about overloaded airports and widespread quarantines, “it’s going to get much much worse before it gets better. Go home. Be with your people.”

“You’re not really _off_ though,” Enjolras says. His next weeks will be full of research and angry emails and urgent chats with the DC office; he imagines Grantaire’s experience will be similar in busyness, if different in temperament. 

“Nah, I can still plan out the proposals I’m working on for next year. The archive index is clunky but it’ll do for now. And I can always go in if I really need to see a thing in person, to feel it in my hands, you know.”

He knows. Sometimes a photo is nowhere near good enough.

God, coming home to the water pressure in their apartment almost makes it possible to believe he might someday feel clean again. Someday, maybe, he’ll be able to touch Grantaire without knowing himself to be a vector for disease.

He’s scrubbed his whole body twice, every inch of it, with suds so thick they’re still dispelling in cloudy heaps down the drain when, to his surprise, the shower door opens and Grantaire squeezes in beside him.

“Wait, babe,” Enjolras says, squinching back into the corner.

“What, it’s not like you’re gonna self-quarantine from me for the next two weeks.” He studies Enjolras’s face. “Oh shit. You are ridiculous.”

“I _should_ isolate myself,” Enjolras protests. “Because if you got it, because of me...”

“Haven’t I already established?” Grantaire growls, and kisses him hard.

That’s all it takes for Enjolras to fill his empty hands with this person he loves, to feel the muscles and the taut skin and the hair, matted with water, that covers so much of him. 

God, he’s already thrusting against R’s leg, stroking his dick while Grantaire’s hands curve around his ass. 

It’s been so long. Too long. And the prospect of longer was so awful that he almost remembers the interminable wait like a memory.

They stumble to their bed with water still beading their backs and shoulders, too ready to be as together as this moment allows. 

Grantaire’s kissing down his body, over his ribs and hipbone, frantic, ravenous.

“God damn, I’m glad I came home to you.”

Grantaire stops. He lifts up from his ribcage to watch him warily.

“What?” Enjolras asks.

“It’s just—you know you just signed on to hunker down through this shit in a one-bedroom apartment with _me._ You know this is gonna be the end of us.”

“It’s just a couple weeks,” Enj says. He is very hard. “We’ve had longer than that.”

“Nonstop, though? Just us?” Grantaire’s hand, at least, settles around Enjolras’s cock and pulls, like he can’t help himself, even while he’s still grappling with the facts of their coming isolation. “And it’s a month at the inside, or I’m an asshole. Fuck off, I’m an asshole, yeah. It’s gonna be at _least_ a month though. Two? Three? Look at Wuhan. And anyway, Enjolras, _anyway_ , people are dying. People _we know_ are going to die. You think that’s in any fucking way comparable?”

But Enjolras, drifting into the familiar splendor of R’s hands, is only halfway here now. Months? Months here with just Grantaire, with Grantaire here to hold and debate and work beside and fuck and—fuck, here to see Enjolras obsess and rage and stew in his own inability to achieve anything of real import. While, right, while actual people actually die from this thing, and the brave beginnings of real change whimper from the margins of this disaster’s blast radius.

Fuck. 

He’s going to be insufferable.

No way Grantaire’s sticking with _him_ through this.

“Nope,” R says, cutting into his thoughts with a twist of his hand that makes Enjolras gasp. R laughs at the sudden shift in his expression. “You don’t get to even think that. I _know_ who you _are_ , Enjolras. I know, and I fucking love it.”

“Oh, you think you—”

“I will never be done with you.”

Grantaire’s eyes are huge, bright and dark at once in the light of one bedside lamp. 

He means it, Enjolras knows, and that knowledge is a surprising thing—like reaching into a coat pocket and finding money you didn’t realize you’d put there. _Never_ , he said, and Enjolras believes him.

“We’re going to figure this out,” Enjolras declares, lifting upward into R’s grip. “We’re going to make space for ourselves, and we’ll need to figure out how to shut each other out sometimes, and it’s going to be intense as fuck, but we’re not burning out here, Grantaire. Not burning out. Just ... burning.”

When doing nothing is the best we can do, yes, we will burn with impatience and inability and needs impossible to meet. If the fundamental routines of our lives can dissolve so rapidly, so easily, it feels like maybe every other thing we’ve thought was real could melt away too. 

But no, not everything. 

Grantaire says, “You’re always on fire, Enj.”

Life hasn’t changed. Just its flimsy wrappers, peeling away in the flames, exposing the solid stuff inside. Enjolras runs his hand up Grantaire’s arm, his neck, into his hair, and pulls his face down. Nose to nose, he looks up into those open eyes. “Fuck me like we are all the way alive.”

**Author's Note:**

> This isolation is new and strange, even with my most important people close at hand. Dear friends, I hope that you aren't feeling too alone. [Write me](https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/profile) if you are-or even if you just kind of want to. God, communication feels like food now.


End file.
